ost first-year law students realize that succeeding in law school
requires moving beyond the days of memorization and "yes" and
"no" answers. But turning that realization into a reality
is often more difficult than students expect.

Jeremy Paul, professor and associate dean for academic affairs
at the University of Connecticut School of Law, has co-authored
a book meant to help students make the transition from successful
undergraduate to stellar law student. In Getting to Maybe: How
to Excel on Law School Exams, Paul and co-author Richard Michael
Fischl explain law school exams in an effort to improve the
reader's performance.

"There's a certain point in the education of an adult when rote
learning is no longer what you want to accomplish," Paul says.
"The law school exam changes the question from 'Did the person
memorize the rules?' to 'Did the person solve the problem?'"

The two authors originally came up with the idea for the book
in the early 1980s when they were both starting their academic
careers at the University of Miami. After making a presentation
to a student group at the university, the two realized that
they shared many of the same ideas about improving students'
performance on exams. Further research showed that there were
no books that made their points.

Though there are countless books about surviving the first year
of law school, their sections on exams are typically short,
Paul says. Another genre is made up of short books about law
school exams that don't explore the connection between the exam
process and what you learn in school, he adds. A third kind
of book serves as an introduction to legal reasoning.

"There was no book that tied all three together," Paul says.
"We thought it was a big market for us."

While the idea for the book struck early in Paul's and Fischl's
careers, they decided to put it on hold while they focused on
their academic work. After Paul arrived at UConn in 1988, he
contacted Fischl, now a professor of law at the University of
Miami, and suggested they start working on the book.

After several trips between Connecticut and Florida, the book
was completed and published by Carolina Academic Press last
year. The publishers of the website Lexis-Nexis have posted
test-taking tips from the book on their web page.

Response to the book, which went into its second printing five
months after publication, has been enthusiastic. In an online
review of the book, the author of a competing book calls Getting
to Maybe a "Godsend." Professors at law schools around the country
have told Paul that they make the book required reading for
students who need help on exams.

At the University of Connecticut School of Law, Professor Deborah
Calloway requires students in her methods course to read the
book.

"My own faculty certainly has given me nothing but positive
feedback," Paul says.

It's not only professors who have welcomed the book.

"I had a student who'd won an award come up to me on awards
day and say, 'I never would have won this award without your
book,'" Paul says.

With this sort of response from faculty, students and other
authors, it seems surprising that no one else has written a
similar book. According to Paul, the book's topic isn't one
that interests many faculty members.

"I think that to write the book the way we did, you have to
be more interested in the nuts and bolts of legal reasoning
than a lot of faculty would be," he says. In addition, most
people who become law professors did very well in law school,
so as students they had no need for a book like Getting to Maybe.

Yet after grading years of exams, the need was clear to authors
Paul and Fischl.

"It came about as a product of experience," Paul says. "To write
this book, having graded thousands of exams was helpful."

Paul and Fischl plan to follow up the successful book with a
law review article explaining why they wrote it. Paul hopes
faculty members who read the article will also read the book.
Doing so could change how they view law school exams and the
way they approach them, he says: "We hope if faculty read it,
it will make them ask 'Why are we doing what we do now?'"